Tina Turner / 1989 / Listening notes Why an anthem invites participation Tina Turner recorded The Best for Foreign Affair in 1989. In her catalogue, it offers a different kind of entry point from the guarded atmosphere of What’s Love Got to Do with It or the character study of Private Dancer. Here the musical … Read more
Tina Turner / 1985 / Listening notes A screen-sized song with a human centre In 1985, Tina Turner appeared as Aunty Entity in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and recorded We Don’t Need Another Hero. It is a natural point of connection between her musical career and her screen presence, and between the Music Artists and … Read more
Tina Turner / 1984 / Listening notes The power of holding something back What’s Love Got to Do with It belongs to Tina Turner’s 1984 Private Dancer era. At the 1985 Grammy ceremony, it won Record of the Year, while songwriters Terry Britten and Graham Lyle received Song of the Year. Those are separate awards … Read more
Tina Turner / 1984 / Listening notes An album that makes room for character Private Dancer brought Tina Turner’s solo career into a new phase in 1984. The album includes What’s Love Got to Do with It, Better Be Good to Me and its title song. Together they make a persuasive introduction to a singer … Read more
Tina Turner / 1976–1984 / Listening notes Rebuilding a musical identity Leaving the Ike & Tina Turner partnership in 1976 did not instantly deliver Tina Turner’s familiar 1980s solo success. The distance between those moments matters. Her later breakthrough belongs to a longer working life, rather than a story in which one record magically changes … Read more
Do you remember a living room in the 1970s where the record player never seemed to stop? In many homes, the record on the turntable belonged to four Swedes in bright costumes with harmonies so clean they sounded almost impossible. Their name was ABBA, and for much of the decade they were the biggest pop … Read more
Do you remember the first time you heard a love song that sounded like a warning? It opened with a cold, pulsing synthesizer line, steady as a heartbeat, and then a voice that was dramatic, pleading, almost theatrical, singing about a love that had gone wrong and could not be fixed. It was not warm … Read more
Do you remember walking out of a cinema feeling like you could fly? In 1982, audiences leaving the film An Officer and a Gentleman carried one song out of the theatre with them. It played over the film’s final scenes, as the story’s lovers found each other against all the odds, and it seemed to … Read more
Do you remember the spring of 1983, when a song with fiddles in it took over the radio and nobody could stop singing along? It started slowly, almost like a folk ballad, and then it burst open: drums, fiddles sawing away, a vocal full of joy and urgency, and a chorus that entire rooms of … Read more
